BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2012: Time to reward magical Andy Murray

To understand why Andy Murray is the finest British sportsman playing today,
you don’t need to look at his service return, his tactical ingenuity, or his
court coverage. You just need to look over the far side of the net.

Golden boy: Andy Murray has enjoyed his best-ever year in tennis, and won two medals at the Olympics - a gold in the singles and a silver in the mixed doubles - and finally broke his grand slam duckPhoto: AFP

Tennis is unique among contemporary sports in the quality of its leading players. Since 2004, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have fought out the greatest sustained rivalry in the history of the game. Then, over the last two seasons, Novak Djokovic has raised the bar again, outplaying both men to establish himself as the rightful world No1.

This is the context in which Murray willed himself, baby step by baby step, to his grand slam breakthrough in New York. The absence of any male Britons on the honour roll since 1936 demonstrated how difficult it is to win a major singles title. And it is only getting harder. In 1977, John Lloyd had his chance against Vitus Gerulaitis in the final of the Australian Open. Twenty years later, Greg Rusedski faced Pat Rafter at Flushing Meadows.

These were both challenging opponents, but not on the level of Djokovic, who pushed Murray almost to the end of his endurance before finally succumbing 7-6, 7-5, 2-6, 3-6, 6-2 in an epic encounter that lasted four hours and 54 minutes.

From a purely historical perspective, you could argue that winning the Tour de France – a feat never before accomplished by a British rider – was an even more seismic event than winning the US Open. But who was Bradley Wiggins up against?

The purge of tainted riders from the dark ages of cycling had left the field bare of recognisable names. After Chris Froome in second place, the next four finishers in the general classification were Vincenzo Nibali, Jurgen Van Den Broeck, Tejay van Garderen and Haimar Zubeldia.

The same, to a lesser extent, goes for Mo Farah. To complete the 5,000m/10,000m double at an Olympic Games is an extraordinary effort, yet Farah’s success has coincided with a slight dip in the quality of the East African runners.

Clearly, there is a tactical element to the races, so a stopwatch comparison can be misleading. But it is still worth noting that Kenenisa Bekele’s winning times in Beijing were 12min 57sec and 27min 01sec, as against Farah’s 13min 41sec and 27min 30sec.

Tennis is not played against the clock – you just have to keep winning until you are the last man standing. At the Olympics, Murray saw off the two top-rated players in the world over the middle weekend. No fewer than 800,000 people went to the BBC website to catch up with his straight-sets demolition of Roger Federer in the gold-medal match. That men’s singles final was the most requested iPlayer broadcast of the whole Olympiad.

In all probability, the cycling lobby will mobilise and anoint Wiggins as our Sports Personality of the Year for what may just be the greatest year in the history of British sport. Tennis fans are less territorial, and less likely to vote en masse, yet they are slowly beginning to warm to Murray. He is a man with a dry sense of humour who does not naturally play the celebrity game, and his reticence has counted against him. He has long been idolised in Scotland, but only since his emotional runners-up speech at Wimbledon have the English sporting public begun to turn in his favour.

When Murray started working with Ivan Lendl at the beginning of the year, he confessed his fear that winning the biggest titles might change him as a person. That hasn’t happened, but he has certainly changed as a player under Lendl’s forensic observation. Just ask Djokovic, who told the BBC last week that “in 2012 [Murray] got more aggressive on court, going for his shots more, particularly on his first shot after his serve”.

From one week to the next Murray has gone out and dealt with the pressure, the expectation and the media scrutiny. Perhaps only Rory McIlroy, out of the other 11 names on the SPOTY shortlist, could understand the relentlessness of the ATP tour.

He finished 2012 as the winner of two of the five biggest tournaments of the year – which is more than Federer, Djokovic or Nadal can claim. He has beaten some of the best sportsmen in the world, in any discipline. And he has done it with flair and imagination. I cannot imagine a more deserving SPOTY.